Purchase
"Contains lines so heartbreakingly apt and funny I stopped to reread constantly. Cohen is a natural." Jonathan Lethem
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
April 2006
288 pages
ISBN: 0374272298
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction Memoir
Sweet and Low is the amazing, bittersweet, hilarious story
of an American family and its patriarch, a short-order cook
named Ben Eisenstadt who, in the years after World War II,
invented the sugar packet and Sweet'N Low, converting his
Brooklyn cafeteria into a factory and amassing the great
fortune that would destroy his family.
It is also the story of immigrants to the New World, sugar,
saccharine, obesity, and the health and diet craze, played
out across countries and generations but also within the
life of a single family, as the fortune and the factory
passed from generation to generation. The author, Rich
Cohen, a grandson (disinherited, and thus set free, along
with his mother and siblings), has sought the truth of this
rancorous, colorful history, mining thousands of pages of
court documents accumulated in the long and sometimes
corrupt life of the factor, and conducting interviews with
members of his extended family. Along the way, the forty-year family battle over the fortune
moves into its
titanic phase, with the money and legacy up for grabs. Sweet
and Low is the story of this struggle, a strange comic farce
of machinations and double dealings, and of an extraordinary
family and its fight for the American dream.
No awards found for this book.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2025 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy